Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 1, 2012

Download the Videos You've Uploaded to YouTube

YouTube lets you download the videos you've uploaded to the service, but the feature has a lot of limitations. "You can download MP4s of your own uploads, so as long as they do not have any copyrighted content or an audio track added through the Audio tool." But that's not all: "there is a limit of two downloads per hour for downloading your video to MP4. The Download MP4 button will not appear next to your videos if you've already downloaded two videos in an hour."

The limitations are absurd, considering that they are your videos and you've uploaded them. There are many services and apps that let you download any YouTube video, but they break YouTube's terms of services.

Fortunately, Google's Data Liberation launched a much better feature in Google Takeout: download the original videos you've uploaded to YouTube with one click. That's right, no more limitations, you can download all your videos and it's the only way to get the original versions, not the videos transcoded by YouTube. "No transcoding or transformation - you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out," explains Google.

Hopefully YouTube doesn't find out about this feature and cripple it with some preposterous limitations.